Weight Loss

As a culture we have always been so hyper focused on weight. It has become a measuring stick, a source of frustration, a tool of shame, an embarrassment, and an emotional roller coaster. Our goal here is to remove the emotional baggage. Reset. Start over with a healthier mindset. YOU are not your weight. Your identity and personality do not need to be bound up in your weight. You are not defined by your weight . . . unless you choose to be. All of that is for fueling the EGO.

Let’s cleanse the spirit of all that past garbage because the single factor that predicts your success or failure is your BELIEFS and general mindset. Weight management has less to do with food and exercise and much more to do with kindness and calm.

Threw you a curveball there didn't I? Kindness? Yes. The vast majority of the driver behind weight gain is “stress”. I create my own stress by my interpretation of events and that stress drives me to seek refuge in the arms of a distracting pleasure like food. It’s called comfort food for a reason. The classic repetitive story of adverse weight gain lies beneath a mindset of “not enough”. I am not enough, not good enough, not fast enough, I don't have enough, I have lack in my life, insufficiency, scarcity of good things. If this makes me feel bad then I want something I can control that makes me fool good . . . food. How many times have you heard yourself say, “I know what to do to lose weight but I just don’t do it. I don't have the will power”. It’s not will power nor knowledge that drives weight loss. The driver is a lack of a deeper understanding of self.

Kindness? Eat a pint of ice cream is not being kind to yourself. It’s an attempt to distract you from your own self-induced pain. It may be pleasure but it is certainly not happiness. If we can understand what makes us happy or that happiness comes from within not from outside of ourselves then our drive for “pleasure” is not running us into the ground with self-destructive behavior. 

See if any of these scenarios loosely approximate your past experience or thought process:

• I work really hard all day, I eat well in the morning and so as my day winds down I have earned that bowl of ice cream or whatever it is I want. Give me a break.
  • TRANSLATION: I really don’t love what I am doing all day. Each day feels like a penalty I am serving rather than a choice I have made so I need a reward for getting through it.
     
• I have worked hard to become “successful” and can afford the nicer things in life. If I want an entire bottle of fine wine then so be it. I have earned it.
  • TRANSLATION:  My ego needs to justify why I need to seek fulfillment in the bottom of a bottle rather than through healthy relationships. 
     
• Why I don’t prepare healthy food: my time is better spent on other things, I hate to cook, I don’t know what to prepare, it’s not important to me.
  • TRANSLATION:  My priorities are out of balance. I think making money or seeking power or position are more important to my growing ego than taking care of the very body my spirit resides in.
     
• I hardly eat anything. I want to lose weight, but no diet works for me and I have tried them all.
  • TRANSLATION: Stating my beliefs through review of the past and projecting expectations into the future but ignoring this present moment.
     
• I’ve always been heavy and my whole family is heavy, this is just the way God intended or the way my genetics dictate.
  • TRANSLATION:  I need to blame someone or something because I am tired of being attacked and made to feel guilty. I need to point to something outside of myself to take responsibility for my helpless situation.
     
• I hate counting, I hate tracking, I eat well but I can’t tell you exactly what it is I consume. I just know its healthy and my body keeps gaining weight.
  • TRANSLATION:  I feel rushed and pressured by life to the point that being fully conscious in how I care for myself has taken a distant back seat.

We wish to start anew with a greater understanding of how our belief system and thought patterns drive the behaviors we engage. Let’s consider the following scenario.  You awaken each day with a fresh new start (provided you slept well . . . more on that later). You awaken with free will, free to choose a joyous life full of happiness. You then grab your cell phone and begin to remind yourself of all your so-called problems. You look at your To Do list and realize how far behind you are. You have 7 new emails and 5 text messages to respond to. The day isn’t even 1 hour old and you have re-reminded yourself that life is difficult, pressurized, problematic and hectic. Sounds lovely. But we do this to OURSELVES! No one put pressure on you, YOU made an interpretation of outside events and decided that this was stressful.

The reality is you can only ever do ONE thing at a time. If you are always performing tasks as a means to an end, and not fully in the joy of doing any one thing, then life becomes a race devoid of joy. A race to catch up. A race to get more. A race to meet expectation. But devoid of the joy of the present moment. It makes sense that if you do give yourself 5 minutes to breathe and relax you choose not to do this at the gym and not to use salad as your pleasure. A mind that is calm and full of joy makes better decisions that feel good. Donuts don’t feel good. They simply scratch the itch for pleasure while they in fact make you feel bad. These are emotional decisions based on our interpretation of events. They are not in fact reality.

Your reality is that you have no external stress. You are not homeless, you have ample food, shelter and clothing and so any stress you choose to feel is in fact self-induced. We become addicted to our stress as we simply don't know how else to function. This is simple pattern repetition. Over and over, again and again. To change the pattern we need to understand the driver . . . our beliefs. It’s OK, you are not alone. The difference between someone successful at weight loss and one who fails is the willingness to look inward and understand the WHY of our behaviors and beliefs.

Let’s take a breath, slow down and DECIDE what is really important and what it is that you truly value. What are the true qualities in life we hold as the most valuable? Your car? Which neighborhood you live in? The size of your house? No, no and no. In the quiet moments of your day if you look inward and truly explore what it is you crave and find most desirable is love, joy and happiness. Is the life you have built set up in a way to deliver these things consistently on a daily basis? Why not? Can you change? Do you desire change?

Then let’s get to work.